Least-Effort Knapping as a Baseline to Study Social Transmission in the Early Stone Age

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Variation in lithics has been used as a mechanism to infer diachronic aspects of hominin behavior. The emergence of the Acheulean industry is considered a major milestone in the evolution of hominin cognition. This perspective is predicated on the idea that Acheulean large cutting tools (LCTs) require mental templates imposed through knapping and that LCTs are reflective of an information transfer system like that seen in human-like culture. This assertion has recently been questioned. A critical gap in the study of socio-cultural mechanisms on Early Pleistocene stone tools is the development of null hypotheses for the presence of human-like culture. A baseline examining the effect of unguided flaking on typo-technological diversity is necessary. We reduced basalt using a random number generator to select the striking platform for each removal. Using 3D geometric morphometrics, we compared the least-effort assemblage to those recovered from the Koobi Fora Formation (Kenya). Randomized removals frequently produce LCTs that approximate the shape variation seen in Plio-Pleistocene LCTs. Therefore, the patterns seen in the Early Acheulean could be produced from a simple flake-core technology (like the Oldowan) preferentially knapping elongated cobbles. This result casts doubt on many hypotheses regarding hominin culture and cognition in the Early Pleistocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37305.0